Ethel Ohlin Bradford

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Extra Sensory Perception

ESP is so commonplace that we don’t blink an eye about it, that is, until it happens to us. No one knows exactly what it means, except we all have those otherwise unexplainable happenings.
We know it’s Extra Sensory Perception, the Sixth Sense, but it’s different from the other five, Taste, Hearing, Smell, Touch, Sight, and no explanation is needed. But ESP? Well, it’s been called Gut Instinct, Third Eye, Hunch, Telepathy, Clairvoyance, Precognition and ad infinitum, but that still doesn’t tell us what it is.
However, when it hits, we need no explaining. One time I answered my phone and it was Margaret, who lived in Seattle. Our acquaintance was so casual that, though we talked for four or five minutes I wondered why she’d called, but as she was getting ready to say goodbye, she asked if I knew where Florence could be reached.
“No,” I answered, “I haven’t seen or heard from her for over a year.” And she said, “Well, take down my phone number and address and if you happen to see her, tell her to give me a call.”
Now, hearing from Florence was so unlikely that I almost didn’t write down the information, but I carelessly scribbled it, while at the same time thinking the paper would be garbaged by the next day.
However, before I even moved from the phone, it rang again, and I silently debated whether or not to answer it, but I did.
Yes, and you have already guessed that, of all people, it was Florence. She, too, had no real reason to call me, and it amazed us both when I told her what had just happened and she said, “Yes, I do need to talk to Margaret and had no idea how to do it, but, really, Ethel, I wasn’t thinking of her when I called you.”
In a daze I sat there and felt as if I had been used by someone or something. That I had been nothing but a Tool. Because, with no conscious thought or even desire on my part, I had been the connecting link between two people who needed to reach each other and didn’t know how. It has remains one of those things that puzzle me to this day.
Another ESP ‘thing’ that comes to me occasionally is one I’m ambivalent about, for I certainly didn’t ask for it. It is the ‘knowing’ when someone is going to die. It doesn’t happen all the time, and sometimes when someone close to me unexpectedly dies, I wonder why hadn’t I been ‘told’, but usually it’s just a casual acquaintance, and not a close friend. Don’t ask me why, but, just the same, it happens.
I just ‘know’, and over and over have been right. I don’t speak of it for it isn’t what you’d call desired information. But one does need to talk to someone about those oddities of the mind, and La Ree Pierson (remember her?) was a godsend to me, for she too, sensed uncanny things, and neither of us considered the other ‘funny’.
ESP is hard to prove, that is, if it needs proving. It isn’t scientific, but far, far more than that, and don’t ask me to tell you ‘how’, because I can’t. I only know that it is.
The stomach can be laid out, measured and proven. The brain, too, can be weighed for size, heft and dissected, as can the heart, lungs, kidneys and on and on. But the Mind? It uses the Brain, but it is not the brain. So vital to each moment of our day, and so vital that, no matter how good a body, or how much money one has, without the Mind we are just a body, nothing more.
Traveling the inward pathway to the Mind is the longest journey we’ll ever take, and who is to say what the ultimate goal will be when we get there, or where that ‘where’ will be.
ESP? You have it, I have it. It uses me and it uses you and if you ever find out what ‘it’ is, tell me. But in the meantime and whatever it is, isn’t it great?????

2 thoughts on “Extra Sensory Perception”

I love this, ya know, we may eveolutionarily related to a monkey, but I have yet to see a steel mill, a car , a rocket to the moon made by an orangutan! Humans have a depth of thot we have yet to plumb, and we may never plumb it.

Wow! When I woke up this morning, I had to shake off a dream that you had made this blog post. Then . . . Just a few hours later (billions of nano-seconds) I saw it on the internet. ESP? Coincidence? i think not!